Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has hit 10 million channel sales one month after its release. The company announced its latest milestone today just eight days after confirming that it had shipped over 6 million units of the S4 since its international launch on April 26. According to Samsung, this is the fastest ever sell rate for any of its smartphones.
Google is enabling a more naturally spoken question-and-answer interface to its search service for people with a new version of Chrome. Google demonstrated conversational search at Google I/O a week ago, a style of search designed to be more like natural human speech than the technically constructed search queries that people often use today to retrieve information from a search engine.
Yahoo's board has approved a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging site Tumblr, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal first reported the news on Sunday via Twitter. An imminent announcement of the acquisition had been expected. AllThingsD reported Friday that Yahoo's board was meeting this weekend to finalize a deal. Rumors about the possible tie-up first surfaced on Thursday.
A full-size iPad that gets closer to the lean design of the iPad Mini may finally be on the way. Production of the fifth-generation iPad is slated to begin in July, according to a report from Taipei-based Digitimes. The new 9.7-inch iPad will be 25 percent to 33 percent lighter than the iPad 4, Digitimes said. Specifically, the 2,048x1,536 pixel-density Retina display (same pixel density as the iPad 4) will have thinner glass - achieved by using new touch sensor technology - and, most importantly, a less bulky backlight apparatus, according to them.
Unexpected instabilities forced Adobe Systems to hasten a planned outage for its Creative Cloud Connection, a service that keeps files made on mobile devices or uploaded to the Web in sync with customers' PCs. Adobe launched it a half year ago in a preview version, and had planned to take it offline this week to update the interfaces the software uses to communicate with Adobe's servers.
One of the many announcements flooding out of Google I/O that may have gotten lost in the shuffle is Android's expected support for Bluetooth Smart technology. This may seem like an odd development, especially if you know that many Android devices already feature Bluetooth 4.0, the version in which Bluetooth Smart (that is, Bluetooth Low Energy) first appeared.
Google announced a small but cool update to Gmail. For emails where the developer has enabled this feature, Google will now show action buttons next to emails in your inbox that let you take actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the schema.org markup language to add their own actions to Gmail messages.
Google says it has rebuilt Google Maps for the Web with a new version that's more immersive and social. The new version takes a page from Google's mobile efforts by putting the search box inside the map and making use of cards - Google's take on interactive information widgets. "It's simple and powerful. The map is the user interface," Google's Bernhard Seefeld told attendees at the company's annual developers conference, where the new Web service was unveiled.
After last year's Google I/O conference, the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team started to think about how attendees experienced the event. They wanted to help attendees gain more insight about the conference space and the environment itself. Which developer Sandboxes were the busiest? Which were the loudest locations, and which were the best places to take a quick nap? They think about data problems all the time, and this looked like an interesting big data challenge that we could try to solve. So this year, they decided to try to answer their questions with a project that's a bit different, kind of futuristic, and maybe a little crazy.
The update to the struggling Windows 8 operating system, known by the code name "Blue," will be called Windows 8.1, a naming convention that Microsoft has used for its software updates for years. Tami Reller, the chief marketing officer and chief financial officer of Microsoft's Windows division, disclosed the name during a speech at J.P. Morgan's Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston this morning.
